Ice by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781741754834
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd

8.

WITH WATSON’S FINANCIAL BACKING Malcolm could at last launch the shipping line that had long been his dream. Since their fares were the cheapest available it was an immediate success, as he had predicted to his father-in-law. Malcolm knew that people wanted the opportunity to flee the Old World, with its famines, wars, pogroms, land clearances, slums, class system, overcrowding and dismal future. Because it was in its infancy everything was possible in Australia, whether it be mining, farming, building. The continent was virtually empty, except for Stone Age Aborigines and a scattering of people, most of them clinging to the coast. And so the immigrants put up with cramped cabins, rough seas, illnesses, inept ships’ doctors, callous crews and storms that threatened to engulf and drown them in the middle of vast, lonely oceans.

While Andrew managed the shipping company from London, Malcolm operated it from Collins Street in Melbourne. The famous, plane-tree-lined street seemed to him to sum up the phantasmagoria of optimism and opportunity that was Australia; gilders, undertakers, Melbourne and Athenaeum clubs, newspaper offices, billiard rooms, livery stables, mansions, doctors’ surgeries, druggists, warehouses, schools, churches, barristers and solicitors, stockbrokers, real estate agents, building companies, tailors, photographers, exclusive shops that dressed women who did the Block—promenading Collins Street’s footpaths in fashionable Worth originals direct from London that flaunted the wearer’s wealth or marriage suitability—banks, insurance offices, barouches drawn by magnificent bays and steeds, mail phaetons, pony carriages, American buggies of every description, the tallest buildings in Australia: Gothic structures with pointed arches, ribbed vaults, high-pitched roofs and supporting walls reinforced by flying buttresses, and other buildings which were a curious and wonderful architectural fusion of Corinthian, Ionic, Doric, early English, late English, Queen Anne, Elizabethan, Renaissance Revival, Second Empire style and Italianate, so that the whole of the two-mile boulevard was a jagged skyline of turrets, towers and spires. Collins Street seemed to have only one purpose: to show off the extraordinary wealth of the colony, a wealth Malcolm now shared and wanted to enlarge upon until he was no longer dependant on his father-in-law.

He and Mary lived in a house bought for them by her father. After a year she fell pregnant. She was pleased and not a little surprised, given her husband worked incredibly long hours and was seldom home. She supposed he was happy at the news, though he was so self-contained it was difficult to tell what his true feelings were. At times he seemed so artificially convivial that she felt like a business associate he was entertaining. Even his fastidious grooming and expensive clothes seemed like an armour worn to protect the real man. Sometimes, as she sat across a dinner-party table from him, she thought how curious it was, that this handsome man, with the red rose in his lapel, was her husband. She did not know what to make of him. Even his courtly manners, learned methodically from experts in deportment, conversation and elocution, seemed to distance him, as if he were an actor playing the role of gentleman.

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